Texan tycoon charged over $9.2bn 'fraud' I Commentary: Mike Atherton I Clarke stands firm despite Stanford saga I Hunte confident Caribbean can survive scandal I

When Lodis B Stanford, a Texan barber, started an insurance company in the small town of Mexia it was at the height of the Great Depression.Seventy-seven years later, the family business that grew under the control of his grandson, R Allen Stanford, into a financial services giant — reportedly handling $51 billion (£36 billion) of assets — appears to be in ruins, another victim of the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s.

Allen Stanford is in many ways a typical Texan: tall (6ft 4in), broad and affable. When he was criticised for being overly friendly towards players' wives during the multimillion-dollar cricket tournament last autumn between his Stanford Superstars and England, he professed wide-eyed innocence. His speech is littered with “hell yeahs” and “doggone its”. Yet beneath the charm there is a steely businessman. After taking a finance degree, he worked for the still modest family company and made several hundred million dollars from buying cheap properties during a collapse in the Texas economy in the 1980s and selling them on at a steep profit.

He took over the business from his father in 1993 and, impatient with small-town life, expanded the developing wealth-management company into Mexico and Latin America. He is a citizen of Antigua and Barbuda, which gave him a Commonwealth knighthood for his patronage of the islands and where he is the largest employer after the Government, although 375 workers have recently been dismissed. Some see him as a benefactor, others as just another colonialist.

Stanford Financial Group sponsors golf, tennis, polo and sailing events, as well as the cricket tournaments for which he is most famous. Last summer he landed his helicopter on the Nursery Ground at Lord's and wheeled out a box containing $20 million, which he offered to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) as annual prize-money in a contest between his team and theirs.

He had already approached India and South Africa. The ECB may be embarrassed that it took the bait.

Three years ago, when Stanford began to invest in West Indies domestic cricket, he told me that he had once discussed the sport with George W Bush and that the President thought cricket “looks a bit like polo and baseball combined, only without the horses”. It was never clear whether Stanford's own understanding of the game ran much deeper, but he certainly saw a way of making money from it.

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